Professional Web Design News

When it comes to search engine optimization and search engine marketing, every SEO expert has their own way of trying to get a site on the first page of Google. There are so many different tips and tricks that people use because there are no absolute set guidelines for how to optimize a website. However, there is one section of code that contains vital tags that should be found on any website that is being optimized and that is the head code (code located between the opening and closing head tags). This section should contain your title tag and your meta tags because this is code that is specifically for the search engines. SEO expert Matt Cutts from Google gave an interview with USA Today and he mentions a few tips about this section of code. He mentions that there are multiple meta tags that you should use but does not say exactly which ones. Below is a list and description of the best tags to use in this head code.

The Title Tag

According to Cutts, the title tag is one of the most important key tags to include in your website. This tag is what is usually displayed in the search results as well as at the top of your browser when you open a site. This tag should be the first piece of code after your opening head tag and it should have the name of your company and should include your keyword/keywords. You also have to keep in mind that Google hates keyword spamming so don’t just list off your keywords in the title tag; make it look natural. Search engines also only give weight to the first few words or so; so don’t make a title tag that is a full length sentence.

Meta keywords Tag

This tag is used to list the keywords that you want to be optimized for and what your site is about. A lot of people will fill this tag with a ridiculous amount of keywords, thinking that they are increasing the amount of words they will appear on. WRONG! This tag should only display the keywords that show up multiple times throughout that specific page of your website. This usually means around 3-5 keywords but definitely no more than 10 should be listed here. This tag is basically just preparing the search engine spider for what it is going to find throughout the page so there is no sense in using keywords that you do not have anywhere on that page. “Don’t worry that much about the keywords tag,” states Matt, “but there are a lot of other tags that you can use.”

Meta Description Tag

This is another very important key tag that you definitely want to include in your head code. Your description is what usually shows up right under the name of your company in the search results. Keep this description short and sweet and make sure it is rich with keywords (again, stay away from keyword spamming). Your description should start off with your primary keyword within the first couple words and then try and add a few other minor keywords within the sentence while making sure it still sounds like an actual sentence. Keep the description to less than or around 160 characters because that is all that is displayed by most search engines.

Meta Robots Tag

This meta tag is for specifying what the search engine robots can and cannot do when they reach your site. There are five terms that can be applied to the robots tag to tell the search-bots what to do when they get to the site: none, noindex, nofollow, all, index and follow. These terms need to be separated by commas if more than one is being used in the robots tag.

• None – robots are to ignore the page completely


• Noindex – page may not be indexed by the search engine


• Nofollow – robots should not follow any links within the current page


• All – robots are free to index the page and follow all links on the page


• Index – robots can include the page in their search results


• Follow – robots are welcome to follow links contained within the page

There is also a robots.txt file that can be placed inside your root folder that can specify sections of your site to ignore and you can specify this for each search engine (http://www.robotstxt.org/).

Meta Googlebot Tag

The Googlebot follows the same terms as the robots tag and an additional noarchive term. It is good to use this tag if you are applying the noindex, nofollow or noarchive terms to the robots tag because this can cause the Googlebot to not index, not follow and/or not archive the page. In the other sense you can tell the Googlebot to index and follow to guarantee that the Googlebot will index the page and follow the links on the page.

Meta MSNbot Tag

The MSNbot follows the same terms as the robots tag so using these in the robots tag can cause the MSNbot to not index the page or not follow the links. You can also use the “all” term to ensure that the MSNbot indexes the page and follows the links.

There are quite a few other meta tags that are out there that may be used for your specific application but for SEO purposes these are the best meta tags to use. Also keep in mind, just using the meta tag does not mean anything; it is the way you use it and how it accurately represents the actual content on your website that matters.

Labels: description, google, keywords, matt cutts, meta, meta tags, seo, seo expert, title tag

There is a very popular saying in the world of search engine optimization and that is “Content is King.” He/she who writes the most and best content is going to reap the benefits from the search engines. Google and other search engines have one primary goal in mind and that is to provide the internet searcher with the best search results for the keyword that they are searching for. These results are based on advanced search engine algorithms that primarily look at your pages content to determine keyword relevancy for each page in your website (I know, it’s kind of a mouthful).

The first major aspect to keep in mind when writing content for your website is the amount of content per page. You want to have a good amount of information and text on each page in order for the search engine to really give weight to your page and its keywords. It is usually recommended to have a minimum of 250 words for each page of your website that you want Google to index. This is about three average size paragraphs. You want this much content on each page because you want your website to be informative and have a lot of information on a certain topic/keyword. Remember the search engine only wants to show relevant results to the user and it is pretty doubtful that a site with 25 words on it is going to be relevant to the searcher.

Second thing to keep in mind when writing content is usage of keywords (for more info on choosing keywords check out SEO Tip Number 1: Choosing Keywords). You want your keywords to make up about 2% or 3% of your total content. So for a page with 250 words on it, you probably want your keyword to be repeated about 8-10 times. You want to primarily use the exact keyword or phrase but you can also break it up here and there if it fits more naturally (for example, if your keyword is something like “professional web design” you would want to use that phrase exactly most of the time but here and there you can use “web design,” Professional,” “professional design,” etc.). Sometimes this is necessary, especially if you are using key phrases, because a long key phrase does not always flow smoothly with the context of a sentence. This brings me to the next point.

Make sure your content flows smoothly because search engines read content very similar to a person. If you are just listing off keywords hoping the search engines will see you, they will; but then they will ban you for spamming. You want your keywords to flow with your content almost to the point that if someone was reading your text, they would have a hard time noticing the fitting of the keywords. Doing this will ensure that when a search engine spider crawls through your content, it will see that your website is truly about the keywords you posted in your meta tags and it will count your website as a good resource for that particular keyword.

One last important factor in content writing is staying on top of your content. Google and other search engines like to see websites that are constantly maintained and updated. Updating and adding content to your pages every so often will ensure that the search engines index your pages more often. Blogs are a great way to do this because they are easy to make posts and update content on the fly. Writing a blog post a few times a month or at least once a week will show the search engines that you are keeping up to date on your site and the website was not just something that was created, put live and then forgot about.

Good content is one of the most important aspects of an SEO compatible website. While there are many other factors that are involved in search engine optimization and a true SEO compatible website, “content is king.” Writing content is not usually the most fun thing in the world so there are companies out there that are professional content writers that can write SEO compatible content for you for a price such as http://www.pearlywrites.com. Whether you write the content yourself or you have someone else write your content for you, it will definitely be worth it in the end because the best SEO results come from good content and all other SEO efforts become less and less valuable if you do not have good content on your website.

Labels: content is king, professional web design, search engine optimization, seo, seo compatible

The Internet and technology have come a long way over the years. Technology is usually advancing so fast that it makes it difficult to buy things because everyone knows they will be out dated within a couple of months. Along with the advancing technology and advancing capabilities of the internet, professional web design has come a long way as well. Websites are now filled with high quality graphics, flash, javascripts, web applications and programs and just like with technology it will only get bigger and better.

The first online website ever created was made by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. Obviously this was nothing fancy, in fact, it was just black text on a white background. Back when the internet was starting out this was all you needed. Companies did not care at all what a web site looked like because if you had a web page up, any web page at all, then you were already ahead of the game. The websites did not need to be super fancy because there were so little websites out there that there was not really any competition.

Then came the template style web pages. These were the next generation of websites that had images and color along with all the necessary content. Most of them were very uniform and blocky looking but they got the job done. For the time, these were great looking websites and most companies trying to get online would purchase or create these template style websites. It was nice because you could throw up your logo and use company colors and the site would look like a professional web design for your company. Template style websites are still created and used today although most of them have gone beyond the old school, blocky, uniform design.

Now the internet has gotten a whole lot faster and computer programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver have made it possible to create almost any web design you want. Also now that the internet is so big and so widely used, it is pretty much necessary for a company to have their own website. Now that there is so much competition online, companies are hiring web designers and creating unique and creative web designs to stand out and be different from the competition. Web designers and webmasters are constantly thinking of new, creative ways to professionally design websites and make them work. Here are some examples of some sites with really impressive flash capabilities: http://www.bluecotton.com or http://www.xpoz.com. Here are a couple of websites with some pretty creative and unique designs: http://www.musclecargarageaz.com or http://www.bird-malaysia.com. This site here, http://www.thefwa.com, has actually compiled a collection of creative and innovative websites; these sites are about as hardcore creative and unique as you can get, feel free to browse through and see the creativity and online capabilities of some of these sites.

As you can see, the web has now become a whole new entity. It has grown into something so big, it is hard to imagine the types of things you can find online. So if you are a business without a website or a business with a pretty basic website, it is coming to that point in time where you need to get online and stand out from your competition with a high-quality professional web design. SEO Compatible Design offers high-quality, creative, professional web design that is always SEO Compatible; give us a call or fill out a free quote form to see what we can do for your website.

Labels: internet, professional web design, seo compatible, technology, website

When it comes to creating a company or promoting a company, good quality logo design is extremely important. The first and most important reason for creating a professional logo is Brand Identity. Your logo is what represents your company and what you do. By having an established logo you are letting consumers know who you are and you are building brand recognition because consumers will start to recognize your logo with the products or services they are looking for.

Logos can also show consumers how big or important your company is. I know this doesn't seem like it should be true but just think of the last time you left someone’s site or store because their logo looked cheap or unprofessional? A high quality, professional, colorful logo (doesn't always have to be colorful) shows consumers that you took the time to develop the logo or you paid some good money for a professional looking logo design.

Logos are also a graphical way to describe what you do. If you have an unusual company name or generic company name, sometimes the logo can portray the products or services you offer. A lot of people are more comfortable visually seeing something rather than just reading or looking at text. This does not necessarily mean your logo has to be very graphical, it really depends on the angle of promotion you are going for.

Remember, in some cases, "less is more." Sometimes, really detailed graphical logos are really cool and creative and they stick out in our minds. In other cases the logo can look overdone or too detailed that it can confuse or annoy the viewer or consumer. Another thing to keep in mind when designing a logo is what you are going to do with the logo; if it is really detailed, think about how it will display on a web page, on a small piece of print, on a large promotional banner, etc.

If you are thinking about starting a company or promoting a company, definitely make sure you have a logo that looks good and represents your products or services. For professional logo design or professional web design, give us a call; our designers will create multiple high-quality mock-ups for you to choose from.

Labels: design tips, logo design, professional logo design, professional web design

The term “spider” in search engine optimization refers to the way Google and other search engines look at your website. When a page gets indexed by a search engine, the search engine spiders crawl through your site and its contents almost like a human reads. The spiders do this insanely fast and they are very smart.

The first thing the spider does is look at your title and your meta tags to determine what it is looking for. This is where you would have your keywords to let the search engine spider know what to look for as it crawls through your content. If you do not have any meta tags or keywords listed then the spider will most likely discard your site and move on. This is why it is extremely important to make sure you have proper meta tags and well-chosen keywords.

After the spider knows what to look for it will start to crawl through your content. They start in the upper left hand corner and read through the content looking for the keywords that it found in your meta tags. Try and bold keywords and the important parts of your content to show the spiders that these are important words or phrases. As I said before, the spiders are very smart so if you have a list of keywords or if your content is not actually relevant to the keywords then the spiders will count it as spam and this will only hurt your website, not help it. The spiders are similar to humans when they read so they can tell if the content does not make sense.

If you have clearly defined links in your content the spiders will follow these links to your other pages and crawl through them. You should put links to your important pages so the spiders will crawl through and see that you have multiple pages with the same or similar keywords and it will show that your website is actually about those keywords. This is where the bottom text navigation comes in. It is extremely important to have a bottom text link navigation with your important pages in it because this is the last area the spider goes, and you want the spider to follow the links and crawl all of your important pages. You should try and include your keywords in these bottom links or at least somewhere in the footer so the spider sees the keywords one last time before it leaves the page.

Things to avoid:

• Because the spider starts in the upper left corner, avoid putting flash or javascript as the first thing on your webpage because it is possible that the spider will see that mess of code first and get lost or just move on and not even look at your entire page.
• Make sure that most of your page has text in it. The spiders cannot read graphics, so if your page is comprised of mostly graphics then the spiders will have nothing to read.
• Avoid too much content. It is good to have a lot of content but if you have way too much on one page then the spider may skip a lot of it because it wants to be efficient.
• Don’t just list your keywords. The spiders are smart so they can tell if you are spamming your site with keywords. Try and space out every keyword throughout the content. Avoid putting two different keywords right next to each other.

For more information about SEO or to contact us about our SEO or professional web design services, feel free to scan through our website: SEO Compatible Design.

Labels: google, professional web design, search engine, search engine optimization, seo, spider, website